The Rump Parliament was the name of the English Parliament after it took over the Long Parliament on December 6, 1648. Among many things, the puritanical Rump Parliament sought to abolish the celebration of Christmas. It’s just like a Christmas movie!
Except people died.
And of course something called the “Rump” Parliament would be miserable. This is just what you would expect from a “Rump” Parliament.
The Liberty Bell isn’t all that American. In fact, it was cast in England.
Like the Harry Potter movies.
In 2007 a UK television station polled 4,000 people to determine the UK’s most ridiculous law. The winner: The law forbidding anyone from dying while in the Houses of Parliament. I don’t really see that as ridiculous. In fact, I have extended the “no dying” law so it applies to my own house.
Rounding out the list was the law making it illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament while wearing a suit of armor. Let’s just say, I learned this one the hard way.
The idiomatic phrase “make no bones about it,” used to state a fact that allows no room for doubt, comes from 15th century England. When people wanted to show their dissatisfaction with something, they would say that they “found bones in it,” referring to unwanted bones that could be found in soup. If you had no bones in your soup, it was ingested without difficulty. This also supports the stereotype that English food is miserable.
Most of us are familiar with Big Ben, one of the most famous landmarks in the United Kingdom. Peter Pan flew by it (why does Peter Pan keep coming up whenever I try to explain a fact?— sorry). What I didn’t realize was that Big Ben referred to the massive bell inside the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, not the clock itself. 23 feet in diameter, the clock first started ticking on May 31, 1859. Behind the clock face, we find Big Ben (officially known as the Great Bell). There are a couple theories behind the nickname. One is that it’s named after English boxer Ben Caunt, but the most commonly accepted theory is that it’s named after Sir Benjamin Hall, a politician and civil engineer who oversaw the installation of the bell. There have been instances since its creation, when the clock tower had to slip under the radar. For 2 years during World War I, the bells were muted and the clock was darkened at night to thwart German zeppelin attacks. In World War II, the clock was again darkened so it wouldn’t guide the Blitz pilots. In 1978, the clock was again dimmed following an unexplained infestation of werewolves (of London).
